Where did all the colors go?

Corsair's Vengeance K70 RGB mechanical keyboard is supposed to deliver a color palette that's precisely 16,777,216 wide, which the industry rounds up to 16.8 million. However, a curious user who often works with Arduino LED projects noticed that something seemed off with his plank, so he did a bit experimenting. What he discovered was that Corsair's K70 RGB was only displaying 512 colors instead of the nearly 16.8 million advertised.

Here come the memes

Nividia ticked off a lot of people when it came to light that its GeForce GTX 970 graphics card was suffering from performance issues when games tried to access onboard memory above 3.5GB. Turns out it's the result of an architectural design, one that doesn't exist on the GTX 980, and one that wasn't communicated to Nvidia's internal marketing team or externally to reviewers. There's been a lot of negativity surrounding the issue ever since, and in an attempt to diffuse the situation, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has offered up an explanation of the GTX 970 memory issue.

Where barebones and Broadwell meet

Shuttle's been a player in the small form factor (SFF) space ever since our cave dwelling ancestors first discovered the PC, which back then was made out of stone and dinosaur bones (this is why we don't teach history, folks). Fast forward to today and Shuttle is still making SFF systems, its latest creation the DS57U, the company's first mini barebones PC with a built-in Broadwell processor.

Carrizo's coming to town

AMD has high hopes for its energy-efficient Carrizo System-on-Chip (SoC) for laptops and low power desktops. The Sunnyvale Chip designer wants you to be optimistic as well, and so it shared several details about Carrizo's architecture at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), saying that Carrizzo will deliver a bunch of advanced power management technologies while also delivering substantial performance by way of new Excavator x86 CPU cores and a new generation of Radeon GPU cores.

Packed to the gills with hardware

Quick, hide your small form factor (SFF) PC and any NUC-like devices you might have hanging around, we wouldn't want any hurt feelings. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum of all these pint-sized PCs that are suddenly vogue is Boxx's new Apexx 5, "the world's most advanced professional workstation." A bold claim for sure, and one the company attempts to back up by cramming its system full of hardware, including five dual-slot GPUs.

Laptop refresh sees an upgrade to Intel's Core i7-5500U CPU

Toshiba today announced that its premium Kirabook 13 i7S1 Touch Ultrabook is now rocking a 5th Generation Intel Core i7-5500U processor based on the Santa Clara chip maker's Broadwell architecture. The new part is a dual-core chip with four threads with a base frequency of 2.4GHz and turbo frequency of 3GHz. It also sports 4MB of cache, Intel HD Graphics 5500, and a 15W TDP.

World's top PC maker installed software that left customers susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks

It's not too often that Lenovo gets dinged for making a bad decision. After all, Lenovo is the top supplier of PCs in the world, and it didn't get there through a series of mishaps. Nevertheless, Lenovo has come under fire for installing hidden software on its consumer laptop and desktop PCs that injects third-party ads on Google searches and websites. Even worse, Lenovo reportedly gave Superfish permission to issue its own security certificates, which allows it to hijack SSL/TLS connections to websites, also known as a man-in-the-middle attack.

HDD dock can short out and cause a fire

Think you're having a bad day? Try having your computer case go up in flames. You'd think a faulty power supply would be to blame in such instances, but apparently an HDD dock can be problematic, too. If you own an Aerocool Strike-X ST case, stop using the HDD dock immediately. Aerocool has issued a recall and is in the process of replacing faulty circuit boards in the HDD dock that can melt the case and catch fire.

A chip for budget overclockers

Rumor has it that AMD is getting ready to release its A8-7650K APU on February 20 in Japan, and presumably other parts of the world soon after. The chips is based on AMD's Kaveri architecture and features an unlocked multiplier. Combined with a price tag that's estimated to be around $117 in Japan, the A8-7650K will be a relatively affordable option for overclockers working with a budget.

A sound decision

When's the last time you fired up a monitor and thought, "Wow, the speakers in this thing are amazing!"? Probably never. The best you can really hope for from the tinny cans that manufactures shove inside of monitors is serviceable audio, but more often than not, they simply suck. Granted, nobody goes shopping for a monitor and puts audio quality at the top of their list, but c'mon, is this the best the industry can do? Maybe not. Asus promises a better audio experience with its new Designo MX27AQ, a 27-inch WQHD (2560x1440) monitorwith embedded ICEpower Bang & Olufsen technology.